At Lady Molly's

1

WE had known General Conyers immemorially not because my father had ever served under him but through some long-forgotten connexion with my mother’s parents, to one or other of whom he may even have been distantly related. In any case, he was on record as having frequented their house in an era so remote and legendary that, if commission was no longer by purchase, regiments of the line were still designated by a number instead of the name of a county. In spite of belonging to this dim, archaic period, traces of which were sometimes revealed in his dress and speech — he was, for example, one of the last to my knowledge to speak of the Household Cavalry as ‘the Plungers’—his place in family myth was established not only as a soldier with interests beyond his profession, but even as a man of the world always ‘abreast of the times’. This taste for being in the fashion and giving his opinion on every subject was held against him by some people, notably Uncle Giles, no friend of up-to-date thought, and on principle suspicious of worldly success, however mild.

‘Aylmer Conyers had a flair for getting on,’ he used to say, ‘No harm in that, I suppose. Somebody has got to give the orders. Personally I never cared for the limelight. Plenty of others to push themselves forward. Inclined to think a good deal of himself, Conyers was. Fine figure of a man, people used to say, a bit too fond of dressing himself up to the nines. Not entirely friendless in high places either. Quite the contrary. Peacetime or war, Conyers always knew the right people.’

I had once inquired about the General’s campaigns.

‘Afghanistan, Burma — as a subaltern. I’ve heard him talk big about Zululand. In the Soudan for a bit when the Khalifa was making trouble there. Went in for jobs abroad. Supposed to have saved the life of some native ruler in a local rumpus. Armed the palace eunuchs with rook rifles. Fellow gave him a jewelled scimitar — semi-precious stones, of course.’

‘I’ve seen the scimitar. I never knew the story.’

Ignoring interruptions, Uncle Giles began to explain how South Africa, grave of so much military reputation, had been by Aylmer Conyers turned to good account. Having himself, as a result of his own indiscretions, retired from the army shortly before outbreak of war in the Transvaal, and possessing in addition those ‘pro-Boer’ sentiments appropriate to ‘a bit of a radical’, my uncle spoke always with severity, no doubt largely justified, of the manner in which the operations of the campaign had been conducted.

‘After French moved over the Modder River, the whole Cavalry Division was ordered to charge. Unheard of thing. Like a gymkhana.’

‘Yes?’

For a minute or two he lost the thread, contemplating the dusty squadrons wheeling from column into line across the veldt, or more probably assailed by memories of his own, less dramatic, if more bitter.

‘What happened?’

‘What?’

‘What happened when they charged?’

‘Cronje made an error of judgment for once. Only sent out detachments. Went through to Kimberley, more by luck than looking to.’

‘But what about General Conyers?’

’Got himself into the charge somehow. Hadn’t any business with the cavalry brigades. Put up some excuse. Then, day or two later, went back to where he ought to have been in the first place. Made himself most officious among the transport wagons. Line of march was like Hyde Park at the height of the Season, so a fellow who was in the advance told me — carriages end to end in Albert Gate — and Conyers running about cursing and swearing as if he owned the place.’

‘Didn’t Lord Roberts say something about his staff work?’

‘Bobs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who said that, your father?’

‘I think so.’

Uncle Giles shook his head.

‘Bobs may have said something. Wouldn’t be the first time a general got hold of the wrong end of the stick. They say Conyers used to chase the women a bit, too. Some people thought he was going to propose to your Great-aunt Harriet.’

Other memories, on the whole more reliable, gainsay any such surmise regarding this last matter. In fact, Conyers remained a bachelor until he was approaching fifty. He was by then a brigadier-general, expected to go much further, when — to the surprise of his friends — he married a woman nearly twenty years younger than himself; sending in his papers about eighteen months later. Perhaps he was tired of waiting for the war with Germany he had so often prophesied, in which, had it come sooner, he would certainly have been offered high command. Possibly his wife did not enjoy following the drum, even as a general’s lady. She is unlikely to have had much taste for army life. The General, for his own part, may have felt at last tired of military routine. Like many soldiers of ability he possessed his eccentric side. Although no great performer, he had always loved playing the ’cello, and on retirement occupied much of his time with music; also experimenting with a favourite theory that poodles, owing to their keen natural intelligence, could profitably be trained as gun dogs. He began to live rather a social life, too, and was appointed a member of the Body Guard; the role in which, from early association of ideas, I always think of him.

‘Funny that a fellow should want to be a kind of court flunkey,’ Uncle Giles used to say. ‘Can’t imagine myself rigged out in a lot of scarlet and gold, hanging about royal palaces and herding in and out a crowd of young ladies in ostrich feathers. Did it to please his wife, I suppose.’

Mrs. Conyers, it is true, might have played some indirect part in this appointment. Eldest daughter of King Edward VII’s friend, Lord Vowchurch, she had passed her thirtieth birthday at the time of marriage. Endless stories, not always edifying, are — or used to be — told of her father, one of those men oddly prevalent in Victorian times who sought personal power through buffoonery. His most enduring memorial (to be found, with other notabilities of the ’seventies, hanging in the damp, deserted billiard-room at Thrubworth) is Spy’s caricature in the Vanity Fair series, depicting this high-spirited peer in frock-coat and top hat, both grey: the bad temper for which he was as notorious at home as for his sparkle in Society, neatly suggested under the side whiskers by the lines of the mouth. In later years Lord Vowchurch grew quieter, particularly after a rather serious accident as a pioneer in the early days of motoring. This mishap left him with a limp and injuries which seem to have stimulated that habitual banter, rarely good-natured, for which he had often been in trouble with King Edward, when Prince of Wales; and, equally often, forgiven. His daughters had lived their early life in permanent disgrace for having, none of them, been born a boy.

My parents never saw much of the General and his wife. They knew them about as well as they knew the Walpole-Wilsons; though the Conyers relationship, with its foundations laid in a distant, fabled past, if never more intimate, was in some way deeper and more satisfying.

Like all marriages, the Conyers union presented elements of mystery. It was widely assumed that the General had remained a bachelor so long through conviction that a career is best made alone. He may have believed (like de Gaulle, whom he lived to see leading the Free French) in a celibate corps of officers dedicated like priests to their military calling. He wrote something of the sort in the United Service Magazine. This theory rested upon no objection to the opposite sex as such. On the contrary, as a young officer in India and elsewhere he was judged, as Uncle Giles had indicated, to have enjoyed a considerable degree of quiet womanising. Some thought that ambition of rather a different sort — a feeling that he had never fully experienced some of the good things of life — had finally persuaded him to marry and retire. A few of the incurably romantic even supposed him simply to have ‘fallen in love’ for the first time on the brink of fifty.

General and Mrs. Conyers seemed to ‘get on’ as well, if not better, than many married couples of a similar sort united at an earlier age. They moved, on the whole, in a circle connected, it might be said unpretentiously (because nothing could have been less ‘smart’, for example in Chips Lovell’s use of the term, than the Conyers ménage) with the Court: families like the Budds and Udneys. In the limited but intense — and at times ornamental — preoccupations of these professional courtiers, the General seems to have found an adequate alternative to a life of command.

They had an only daughter called Charlotte, a rather colourless girl, who married a lieutenant-commander in the Navy. I used sometimes to have tea with her when we were both children.

In 1916, towards Christmas, at a time when Mrs. Conyers was assembling ‘comforts’ for troops overseas (still at this period in more amateur hands than the organisation that employed Uncle Giles after America came into the war) I was taken — passing through London on the way home from school — to her flat near Sloane Square. My mother paid the call either to add some knitted contribution to the pile of socks, scarves and Balaclava helmets lying about on chairs and sofas, or to help in some matter of their distribution. In the corner of the room in which all these bundles were stacked stood the ’cello in a case. Beside it, I at once noticed a large photograph of the General, carrying a halberd and wearing the plumed helmet, swallow-tailed coat and heavy gold epaulettes of a Gentleman-at-Arms. That is why I always think of him as a statuesque figure at leveés and court balls, rather than the man of action he must for the greater part of his life have been. Retired from the army too long for any re-employment of the first importance, he had acquired soon after the outbreak of war some job, far from momentous, though respectably graded in the rank of major-general.

We had finished tea, and I was being shown the jewelled scimitar to which Uncle Giles had referred, which was kept for some reason in the London flat instead of the small house in Hampshire where the poodles were trained. This display was made by Mrs. Conyers as some amends for the fact that Charlotte was in the country; although no apology was necessary as it seemed to me more amusing without her. I was admiring the velvet-covered scabbard, wondering whether to draw the steel from its sheath would be permissible, when the maid showed someone into the room. This new arrival was a young woman wearing V.A.D. uniform, who strode in like a grenadier. She turned out to be Mildred Blaides, youngest sister to Mrs. Conyers.

Difference of age between the two of them must have been at least that of Mrs. Conyers and her husband. This Miss Blaides, indeed, represented her parents’ final, unsuccessful effort to achieve an heir, before Lord Vowchurch’s motor accident and total resignation to the title passing to a cousin. She was tall, with a long nose, no more handsome than her sister, but in my eyes infinitely more dashing than Mrs. Conyers. Her face was lively, not unlike the mask of a fox. Almost immediately she took from her pocket an ornamental cigarette-case made of some lacquer-like substance and lit a cigarette. Such an act, especially in one so young, was still in those days a sign of conscious female emancipation. I suppose she was then about twenty.

‘Mildred is at Dogdene now,’ explained Mrs. Conyers, ‘You know the Sleafords offered their house as an officers’ hospital when the war broke out. They themselves live in the east wing. There are huts all over the park too.’

‘It’s absolute hell having all those blighters in huts,’ said Miss Blaides. ‘Some of the tommies got tight the other night and pushed one of the stone urns off the Italian bridge into the lake. It was too bad of them. They are a putrid unit anyway. All the officers wear “gorblimeys”.’

‘What on earth are those, Mildred?’ asked Mrs. Conyers, nervously.

I think she feared, after asking the question, that they might be something unsuitable to mention in front of a small boy, because she raised her hand as if to prevent the exposure of any too fearful revelation.

‘Oh, those floppy army caps,’ said Miss Blaides, carelessly. ‘They take the stiffening out, you know. Of course they have to do that when they are up at the Front, to prevent bits of wire getting blown into their cocoanuts, but they might try and look properly turned out when they are over here.’

She puffed away at her cigarette.

‘I really must check all these gaspers,’ she said, flicking ash on to the carpet. ‘By now it’s got up to about thirty a day. It just won’t do. By the way, Molly Sleaford wants to come and see you, Bertha. Something about the distribution of “comforts”. I told her to look you up on Wednesday, when she is next going to be in London.’

For some reason this announcement threw Mrs. Conyers into a state of great discomposure.

‘But I can’t possibly see Lady Sleaford on Wednesday,’ she said, ‘I’ve got three committee meetings on that day and Aylmer wants me to have five Serbian officers to tea. Besides, dear, Lady Sleaford is Red Cross, like you — and you remember how I am rather wedded, through Lady Bridgnorth, to St. John’s. You see I really hardly know Lady Sleaford, who always keeps very much to herself, and I don’t want to seem disloyal to Mary Bridgnorth. I—’

Her sister cut her short.

‘Oh, I say, what a bally nuisance,’ she remarked. ‘I quite forgot about beastly old St. John’s. They are always cropping up, aren’t they? I really think they do more than the Germans to hold up winning the war.’

After voicing this alarming conjecture, she paced up and down the room, emitting from each nostril a long eddy of smoke like the trail of a ship briskly cutting the horizon. Throughout the room I was increasingly aware of the hardening of disapproval, just perceptible at first even on the immediate arrival of Miss Blaides: now not by any means to be denied. In fact a sense of positive disquiet swept through the small drawing-room so powerfully that mute condemnation seemed to rise in a thick cloud above the ‘comforts’, until its disturbing odour reached the ceiling and hung about the whole flat in vexed, compelling waves. This disapproval was on the part not only of Mrs. Conyers, but also — I felt sure — of my mother as well, who now began to make preparations to leave.

‘A blinking bore,’ said Miss Blaides, casting away her cigarette-end into the grate, where it lay smouldering on the tiles. ‘That’s what it is. So I suppose I shall have to tell Molly it’s a wash-out. Give me another cup of tea, Bertha. I mustn’t stay too long. I’ve got plans to scramble into some glad rags and beetle off to a show tonight.’

After that, we said good-bye; on my own part with deep regret. Later, when we were in the train, my mother said: ‘I think it a pity for a girl like Miss Blaides to put on such a lot of make-up and talk so much slang. I was rather interested to see her, though. I had heard so much about her from different people.’

I did not mention the fact in reply, but, to tell the truth, Miss Blaides had seemed to me a figure of decided romance, combining with her nursing capacity of a young Florence Nightingale, something far more exciting and perhaps also a shade sinister. Nor did I realise at that time the implications contained in the phrase to ‘hear a lot about’ someone of Miss Blaides’s age and kind. However, the episode as a whole — the Conyers’ flat, the General’s photograph, the jewelled scimitar, the ‘comforts’ stacked round the room, Miss Blaides in her V.A.D. uniform — all made a vivid impression on my mind; although, naturally enough, these things became soon stored away, apparently forgotten, in the distant background of memory. Only subsequent events revived them in strong colours.

That afternoon was also the first time I ever heard Dogdene mentioned. Later, of course, I knew it as the name of a ‘great house’ about which people talked. It came into volumes of memoirs like those of Lady Amesbury, which I read (with some disappointment) at an early age after hearing some grown-up person describe the book as ‘scurrilous’. I also knew Constable’s picture in the National Gallery, which shows the mansion itself lying away in the middle distance, a faery place set among giant trees, beyond the misty water-meadows of the foreground in which the impastoed cattle browse: quite unlike any imaginable military hospital. I knew this picture well before learning that the house was Dogdene. By then the place was no longer consciously associated in my mind with Miss Blaides. I was aware only vaguely that the owners were called Sleaford.

Then one day, years and years later, a chance reference to Dogdene made me think again of Miss Blaides in her original incarnation as a V.A.D., a status become, as it were, concealed and forgotten, like relics of an early civilisation covered by an ever-increasing pile of later architectural accretion. This was in spite of the fact that the name of Mildred Blaides would sometimes crop up in conversation after the occasional meetings between my parents and General or Mrs. Conyers. When she figured in such talk I always pictured a person somehow different from the girl chattering war-time slang on that winter afternoon. In fact the original memory of Miss Blaides returned to me one morning when I was sitting in my cream distempered, strip-lighted, bare, sanitary, glaring, forlorn little cell at the Studio. In that place it was possible to know deep despondency. Work, sometimes organised at artificially high pressure, would alternate with stretches of time in which a chaotic nothingness reigned: periods when, surrounded by the inanities and misconceptions of the film world, a book conceived in terms of comparative reality would to some extent alleviate despair.

During one of these interims of leisure, reading a volume of his Diary, I found Pepys had visited Dogdene. A note explained that his patron, Lord Sandwich, was connected by marriage with the then Countess of Sleaford: the marquisate dating only from the coronation of William IV.

‘So about noon we came to Dogdene, and I was fain to see the house, and that part newly builded whereof Dr. Wren did formerly hold converse with me, telling me here was one of the first mansion houses of England contrived as a nobleman’s seat rather than a keep moated for warfare. My Lord Sleaford is yet in town, where ’tis said he doth pay court to my Lady Castlemaine, at which the King is not a little displeased, ’tho ’twas thought she had long since lost her place. The Housekeeper was mighty civil, and showed us the Great Hall and stately Galleries, and the picture by P. Veronese that my Lord’s grandfather did bring with him out of Italy, a most rare and noble thing. Then to the Gardens and Green Houses, where I did marvel to see the quickening of the Sensitive Plant. And so to the Still Room, where a great black maid offered a brave glass of metheglin, and I did have some merry talk with her begging her to show me a painted closet whereof the Housekeeper had spoken, yet had we not seen. Thither the bold wench took me readily enough, where I did kiss her twice or thrice and toyed wantonly with her. I perceive that she would not have denied me que je voudray, yet was I afeared and time was lacking. At which afterwards I was troubled, lest she should speak of what I had done, and her fellows make game of me when we were gone on our road.’

Everyone knows the manner in which some specific name will recur several times in quick succession from different quarters; part of that inexplicable magic throughout life that makes us suddenly think of someone before turning a street corner and meeting him, or her, face to face. In the same way, you may be struck, reading a book, by some obscure passage or lines of verse, quoted again, quite unexpectedly, twenty-four hours later. It so happens that soon after I read Pepys’s account of Dogdene, I found myself teamed up as a fellow script-writer with Chips Lovell. The question arose of some country house to appear in a scenario.

‘Do you mean a place like Dogdene?’ I asked.

‘That sort of thing,’ said Lovell.

He went on to explain, not without some justifiable satisfaction, that his mother, the current Lord Sleaford’s sister, had been brought up there.

I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films. To be ‘an author’ was, of course, a recognised path of approach to this means of livelihood; so much so, indeed, at that period, that to serve a term as a script-writer was almost a routine stage in literary life. On the other hand, Lovell’s arrival in the Studio had been more devious. His chief stock in trade, after an excellent personal appearance and plenty of cheek, was expert manipulation of a vast horde of relations. Much more interested in daily journalism than in writing scenarios, he coveted employment on the gossip column of a newspaper. I knew Sheldon slightly, one of the editorial staff of the evening paper at which Lovell aimed, and had promised to arrange, if possible, a meeting between them.

Lovell delighted in talking about his relations. His parents had eloped on account of family opposition to their marriage. There had not been enough money. The elder Lovell, who was what Uncle Giles used to call ‘not entirely friendless in high places’, was a painter. His insipid, Barbizonish little landscapes, not wholly devoid of merit, never sold beyond his own circle of friends. The elopement was in due course forgiven, but the younger Lovell was determined that no such grass should grow under his own feet. He was going to get on in life, he said, and in a few years make a ‘good marriage’. Meanwhile, he was looking round, enjoying himself as much as business permitted. Since there were few enough jobs going about for young men at that time, his energies, which were considerable, had brought him temporarily into the film business; for which every one, including himself, agreed he had no particular vocation. Something better would turn up. The mystery remained how, in the first place, he had been accepted into an overcrowded profession. Our colleague, Feingold, hinted that the American bosses of the company dreamed of some intoxicating social advantage to be reaped by themselves, personally, through employing an eligible young man of that sort. Feingold may have been right; on the other hand, he was not wholly free from a strain of Jewish romanticism. Certainly it would have been hard to think of any fantasy too extraordinary for the thoughts of these higher executives to indulge.

One night, not long after we had talked of Dogdene, I had, together with Lovell, Feingold and Hegarty, unwillingly remained later than usual at the Studio in an effort to complete one of those ‘treatments’ of a film story, the tedium of which is known only to those who have experienced their concoction. On that particular evening, Feingold, in his mauve suit and crimson tie, was suffering from an unaccustomed bout of depression. He had graduated fairly recently from the cutting-room, at first full of enthusiasm for this new aspect of his craft. The pink skin of his plump, round face had begun to sag, making pockets around his bluish chin, as he lay back in a chair with an enormous pile of foolscap scribblings in front of him. He looked like a highly-coloured poster designed to excite compassion for the sufferings of his race. Hegarty was also in poor form that day. He had been a script-writer most of his grown-up life — burdened by then with three, if not four, wives, to all of whom he was paying alimony — and he possessed, when reasonably sober, an extraordinary facility for constructing film scenarios. That day, he could not have been described as reasonably sober. Groaning, he had sat all the afternoon in the corner of the room facing the wall. We were working on a stage play that had enjoyed a three-weeks West End run twenty or thirty years before, the banality of which had persuaded some director that it would ‘make a picture.’ This was the ninth treatment we had produced between us. At last, for the third time in an hour, Hegarty broke out in a cold sweat. He began taking aspirins by the handful. It was agreed to abandon work for the day.

Lovell and I used to alternate in which of us brought a car (both vehicles of modest appearance) to the Studio. That night it was Lovell’s turn to give me a lift. We said good night to Feingold, who was moving Hegarty off to the pub at the end of the road. Lovell had paid twelve pounds ten for his machine; he started it up, though not without effort. I climbed in beside him. We drove towards London through the mist, blue-grey pockets of cloud drifting up ominously from the river.

‘Shall we dine together?’

‘All right. Let it be somewhere cheap.’

‘Of that I am strongly in favour,’ said Lovell. ‘Do you know a place called Foppa’s?’

‘Yes — but don’t let’s go there.’

Although things had been ‘over’ with Jean for some time by then, Foppa’s was still for some reason too reminiscent of her to be altogether comfortable; and I was firmly of the opinion that even the smallest trace of nostalgia for the immediate past was better avoided. A bracing future was required, rather than vain regrets. I congratulated myself on being able to consider the matter in such brisk terms. Lovell and I settled on some restaurant, and returned to the question whether Sheldon would be able to arrange for the job to be offered at just the right moment: the moment when Lovell’s contract with the film company terminated, not before, nor too long after.

‘I’m going to look in on an aunt of mine after making a meal,’ Lovell said, tired at last of discussing his own prospects, ‘Why not come too? There are always people there. At worst, it’s a free drink. If some lovely girls are in evidence, we can dance to the gramophone.’

‘What makes you think there will be lovely girls?’

‘You may find anything at Aunt Molly’s — even lovely girls. Are you coming?’

‘I’d like to very much.’

‘It’s in South Kensington, I’m afraid.’

‘Never mind. Tell me about your aunt.’

‘She is called Molly Jeavons. She used to be called Molly Sleaford, you know.”

‘I didn’t know.’

Confident that Lovell would enjoy giving further information, I questioned him. He had that deep appreciation of family relationships and their ramifications that is a gift of its own, like being musical, or having an instinct for the value of horses or jewels. In Lovell’s own case, he made good practical use of this grasp, although such a talent not uncommonly falls to individuals more than usually free from any desire for personal advancement: while equally often lacking in persons rightly regarded by the world as snobbish. Lovell, almost as interested in everyone else’s family as his own, could describe how the most various people were in fact quite closely related.

‘When my first Sleaford uncle died,’ said Lovell, ‘his widow, Molly, married a fellow called Jeavons. Not a bad chap at all, though of rather unglamorous background. He couldn’t be described as particularly bright either, in spite of playing quite a good game of snooker. No live wire, in fact. Molly, on the other hand, is full of go.’

‘What about her?’

‘She was an Ardglass.’

‘Any relation of Bijou Ardglass?’

‘Sister-in-law, before Jumbo Ardglass divorced Bijou — who was his second wife, of course. Do you know her — probably slept with her? Most of one’s friends have.’

‘I’ve only seen her about the place. No other privileges.’

‘Of course, you wouldn’t be rich enough for Bijou,’ said Lovell, not unkindly. ‘But, as I was saying, Bijou got through what remained of the Ardglass money, which wasn’t much, and left Jumbo, who’d really had enough himself by that time. Since then, she has been keeping company with a whole string of people — Prince Theodoric — God knows who. However, I believe she still comes to see Molly. Molly is like that. She will put up with anyone.’

‘But why do you call him your “first” Sleaford uncle?’

‘Because he died, and I still have an uncle of that name — the present one is Geoffrey — the first, John. Uncle Geoffrey was too poor to marry until he succeeded. He could only just rub along in one of the cheaper cavalry regiments. There were two other brothers between him and the title. One was killed in the war, and the other knocked down by a bus.’

‘They don’t seem much good at staying alive.’

‘The thing about the Sleafords,’ said Lovell, ‘is that they’ve always been absolutely mad on primogeniture. That’s all very well in a way, but they’ve been so bloody mean to their widows and younger children that they are going to die out. They are a splendid example of upper-class stinginess. Geoffrey got married at once, as people do when they come into a peerage, however dim. Of course, in this case — with Dogdene thrown in — it was something worth having. Unfortunately they’ve never managed to knock up an heir.’

Lovell went on to describe his ‘first Sleaford uncle’, who seems to have been a chilly, serious-minded, competent peer, a great organiser of charitable institutions, who would have done well for himself in any walk of life. For a time he had been taken up with politics and held office under Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith.

‘He resigned at the time of the Marconi scandal,’ said Lovell. ‘He hadn’t been making anything on the side himself, but he thought some of his Liberal colleagues had been a bit too liberal in the ethics of their own financial dealings. He was a selfish old man, but had what is called an exaggerated sense of honour.’

‘I think I’ve seen Isbister’s portrait of him.’

‘Wearing the robes of the Garter. He took himself pretty seriously. Molly married him from the ballroom. She was only eighteen. Never seen a man before.’

‘When did he die?’

‘Spanish ’flu in 1919,’ said Lovell. ‘Molly first met Jeavons when Dogdene was a military hospital in the war. He was rather badly wounded, you know. The extraordinary thing was they didn’t start a love affair or anything. If Uncle John hadn’t died, she would still be — in the words of an Edwardian song my father hums whenever her name is mentioned—“Molly the Marchioness.”’

‘Where did she re-meet her second husband?’

‘At the Motor Show. Went to Olympia in her widow’s weeds and saw Jeavons again. He was acting as a polisher on one of the stalls. I can’t remember which make, but not a car anyone would be proud to own. That represented just about the height of what he could rise to in civil life. They were married about six months later.’

‘How does it go?’

‘Very well. Molly never seems to regret the Dogdene days in the least. I can’t think what they use for money, because, if I know the Sleafords, she didn’t get much in the way of a jointure — and I doubt if she has a hundred a year of her own. The Ardglass family have been hopelessly insolvent since the Land Act. However, she manages to support herself — and Jeavons — somehow. And also get some fun out of life.’

‘Doesn’t Jeavons bring in anything?’

‘Not a cent. I think he feels pretty ill most of the time. He often looks like death itself. Besides, he is quite unemployable. As a matter of fact, it isn’t true to say he does nothing. Once in a way he has some appliance he is marketing — an automatic bootjack or new cure for the common cold. Something he gets a commission on, or perhaps some firm is paying him a trifle to recommend the thing.’

The description made an impression on me. The picture of Jeavons took on a more positive shape: not a particularly attractive one. ‘Realism goes with good birth,’ Lovell used to say, and he himself certainly showed this quality where his own relations were concerned. The statement might be hard to substantiate universally, but, by recognising laws of behaviour operating within the microcosm of a large, consanguineous network of families, however loosely connected, individuals born into such a world often gain an unsentimental grasp of human conduct: a grasp sometimes superior to that of apparently more perceptive persons whose minds are unattuned by early association to the constant give and take of an ancient and tenacious social organism. Of course, it does not always work that way, but Lovell, with his many limitations, was himself a good example of the principle.

‘The chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly,’ he said, ‘is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there.’

‘A sister of Blanche Tolland?’

‘Yes. Do you know Blanche?’

‘Only by sight, and years ago. She is rather dotty, isn’t she?’

‘Quite dotty,’ said Lovell. ‘Lives in a complete world of her own. Fairly happy about it though, I think.’

‘Then there is one called Norah, isn’t there, who set up house with a rather strange girl I used to know called Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.’

‘That’s it. She is rather dotty too, but in a different way. That couple are said to be a ménage. Then there is Isobel. She is rather different. Priscilla is the youngest. She isn’t really “out” yet.’

I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine at that period, to Lovell’s twenty-three or twenty-four, and through him had become aware for the first time that a younger generation was close on my heels. I told him I felt much too old and passé to take an interest in such small fry as young ladies who were not yet ‘out’.

‘Oh, I quite realise that,’ said Lovell indulgently. ‘There will certainly be elder persons there too for chaps like you who prefer serious conversation. You might like Isobel. I believe she is a bit of a highbrow when she isn’t going to night clubs.’

We drove precariously down Gloucester Road, the car emitting a series of frightening crepitations and an evil fume, while Lovell artlessly outlined his long-term plans for the seduction of Priscilla Tolland. We turned off somewhere by the Underground station. I liked the idea of going to this unknown place for an hour or so, surroundings where the cheerless Studio atmosphere might be purged away. Lovell stopped in front of a fairly large house of dark red brick, the architecture of which sounded a distant, not particularly encouraging, echo of the High Renaissance. After waiting on the doorstep for some time, the door was opened by a man of indeterminate age in shirt sleeves and carpet slippers. He might have passed for a butler. Pale and unhealthy looking, he had the air of having lived for months at a time underground in unventilated, overheated rooms. He brought with him odours of beer and cheese. Closer examination of this unkempt, moody fellow revealed him as older than he had appeared at first sight.

‘Good evening, Smith,’ said Lovell, rather grandly.

‘’Evening,’ said Smith, speaking without the smallest suggestion of warmth.

‘How are you, Smith?’

Smith looked Lovell up and down as if he considered the enquiry not merely silly, but downright insulting. He did not answer.

‘Is her Ladyship upstairs?’

‘Where do you think she’d be — in the basement?’

The tone of Smith’s voice made no concession whatever towards alleviating the asperity of this answer. Lovell showed no sign of surprise at being received so caustically, passing off the retort with a hearty laugh. Smith shambled off down the stairs, muttering to himself. He seemed thoroughly fed up, not only with Lovell, but also with his own job.

‘Smith is wonderful, isn’t he?’ said Lovell, as we mounted the staircase. ‘Aunt Molly sometimes borrows him from Erridge, when, for one reason or another, Thrubworth is closed down. I should warn you there is never an electric light bulb in the downstairs lavatory here and sometimes no bromo.’

I followed him to the first floor; and into a double drawing-room in which eight or nine persons were standing or sitting. A general though never precisely defined suggestion of chinoiserie, sustained by a profusion of Oriental bowls and jars, pervaded the decoration. Some of the furniture was obviously rather valuable: the rest, gimcrack to a degree. Pictures showed a similar variation of standard, a Richard Wilson and a Greuze (these I noted later) hanging among pastels of Moroccan native types. A dark, handsome woman, now getting a trifle plump by the emaciated standards of the period, came towards us.

‘Why, Chips,’ she said. ‘Here you are at last. We thought you would be earlier.’

‘Couldn’t get away, Aunt Molly,’ said Lovell. ‘This is Mr. Jenkins. He and I slave away writing films together.’

‘What will you drink?’ she asked. ‘Teddy, get them something to drink quickly. They must be in dire need.’

She smiled at me as if she were rather proud of that last phrase. Jeavons now appeared before us and began to make some rather hopeless gestures in the direction of several bottles and decanters standing on a table at the far end of the room. It was at once apparent that he was something left over from the war. I found it almost impossible to believe that he would so much resemble the mental picture conjured up by Lovell’s earlier description of him. Like one of those mammoths — or, in Jeavons’s case, somewhat less gigantic form of primeval life — caught in a glacier and physically preserved into an age when his very kind was known only from fossilised bones, or drawings on the walls of subterranean caves, he somehow managed to look just as he must have looked in 1917: hardly a day older. Perhaps a better simile to indicate the effect of remoteness he gave, standing there with a vacant expression and both hands in his pockets, would be that of some rare insect enclosed in amber. He wore a minute Charlie Chaplin moustache, his dark, shiny hair, in which there was a touch of red, rolling away from his forehead like the stone locks of a sculpted head of Caracalla.

At this point I became suddenly aware that at least one of the guests present was already well known to me. This was my family’s old friend, Mrs. Conyers. Although I had not seen her at all recently, we had met from time to time — usually at intervals of several years — since the distant day when I had been taken to her flat and shown the scimitar. The last occasion had been the wedding of her daughter, Charlotte, to the lieutenant-commander. Evidently Mrs. Conyers had been dining with the Jeavonses. However, it appeared that she did not know them well, and, perhaps not greatly at ease in their society, she was clearly much relieved at finding, in myself, someone she knew of old. I was not sure that I myself was equally pleased, for, although I liked Mrs. Conyers well enough, I thought it preferable to explore new ground like the Jeavons house unobserved by old friends of my parents. However, nothing could have been less admonitory than Mrs. Conyers’s manner towards myself; if admonition properly defines the attitude threatened, when one is young, by the presence of old family friends.

In appearance Mrs. Conyers retained, no doubt from her childhood, the harassed, uncertain expression of those who have for many years had to endure close association with persons addicted to practical joking. Like the rest of her sisters, she must have suffered in no small degree from her father’s love of horse-play. One of six daughters, she had been regarded as ‘on the shelf’ by her parents when the General proposed to her. She herself had probably abandoned thought of marriage, because she was by then devoting most of her time to attending an elderly, intractable relation, Sybil, Lady Amesbury, whose memoirs 1 mentioned earlier. One of her father’s exploits had been recorded in this book, the occasion when Lord Vowchurch, in his younger days, had loosed half a dozen monkeys wearing tail-coats and white ties at an ambassadorial ball: a casual relic of innumerable similar anecdotes that have passed into oblivion.

Although never exactly handsome, Mrs. Conyers was not without a look of sad distinction. In public she deferred to her husband, but she was known to possess a will of her own, displayed in that foxy, almost rodent-like cast of feature, which, resembling her sister’s in its keenness, was not disagreeable. It was said that she had entirely reorganised the General’s life after he had left the army; and much for the better. When I went across the room to speak with her, she raised her eyebrows slightly to indicate, if not precise disapproval, at least a secret signal that she felt herself not altogether at home. The message read that she required any support she could get.

Lovell had made for a red-faced, grey-moustached, elderly man, who seemed, like Mrs. Conyers, to have been a member of the dinner-party. This person possessed a curiously old-world air, suggesting an epoch considerably more remote than the war-time span conveyed by his host’s outward appearance. Although not so old, he seemed to belong more, at least in spirit, to the vintage of General Conyers. I caught the words ‘Uncle Alfred’. Lovell called so many men uncle that one could not be sure how closely related to him, if at all, any of them might be. This uncle acknowledged Lovell’s greeting fairly curtly. There was something familiar about that red face, white moustache and muffled, uneasy manner. Then I realised that he was Tolland, that lonely, derelict character accustomed to frequent the annual Old Boy dinner of Le Bas’s house. In fact, I had myself once sat next to Tolland at one of those functions: an occasion when I had made up my mind never to attend another.

It was a surprise to find Mrs. Conyers and Tolland here, but there was no reason why they should not both be friends of Lady Molly Jeavons. Mrs. Conyers was now engaged by her hostess, and led up to a swarthy young man, also wearing a dinner-jacket, who was standing by the gramophone turning over the pages of a book of records. They all began to talk French together. At that moment my eye caught Tolland’s. He stared back, not without a certain apprehension in his look. Then he cleared his throat and advanced towards me.

‘I didn’t see you at the Le Bas dinner this year,’ he said.

He spoke with reproach, as if to mention such a breach of faith was an embarrassing duty his conscience laid upon him. In these surroundings, evidently his own ground, I felt less ability to cope with his peculiarities than at the Le Bas dinners. It seemed better to conceal the decision never to attend another one.

‘I didn’t manage to get there.’

‘It went off all right,’ said Tolland slowly, as if ghastly failure had been a matter of touch and go. ‘I always accept when the card comes round. It makes a pleasant evening. Got to keep in touch. Of course Le Bas always says that in his speech.’

Molly Jeavons, after talking for a minute or two with Mrs. Conyers and the young man with the black moustache, now rejoined Tolland and myself.

‘I couldn’t keep it up any longer,’ she said. ‘French is too exhausting. My governess said I was the worst pupil she’d ever had at the irregular verbs. All the same, I wanted to hear if there was anything new about Theodoric.’

She pointed her finger at me.

‘Is he another of your relations, Alfred?’ she asked.

Her tone suggested that potential relationship with Tolland might explain everything: why I had come to the house: why I looked as I did: why we were talking together. I attempted to reduce my appearance to something as negative as possible, so that no one might be unduly committed by the enquiry, which had thrown Tolland into an appalling access of embarrassment.

‘Really, I believe you have more relations than I have myself,’ she went on. ‘My grandfather had ninety-seven first cousins, and he was only three up on my grandmother on my mother’s side.’

‘No — no — no,’ said Tolland, hurriedly. ‘At least I don’t think we are, are we? Never know — perhaps I oughtn’t to have been so definite — quite on the cards, I suppose, as a matter of fact. Shouldn’t speak hastily about such things. Certainly got a lot of ’em. Some people might think too many, as you say, Molly. No — no — no. Perhaps you can tell better than me. Are we related? No? Thought not. Always try to keep track of ’em. Hard to manage sometimes. Go abroad and get married and get divorced and into debt, glad to see the back of ’em sometimes. But where you and I meet is at the Le Bas dinner. That’s where we meet.’

He gasped a bit after all this, as if not only breathless from speaking at such length, but also overcome with confusion at the predicament into which he had been thrown by the question. Yet, even in spite of this floundering, he seemed to feel himself on much surer ground in this house than at our previous meetings. He might be temporarily at a disadvantage here with his hostess, even on guard against attack from her (a minute or two later I found he had good reason to fear that), but at least his credentials were known and freely accepted in the Jeavons drawing-room. I was by no means sure that I felt myself equally at ease. The atmosphere of the house was not exactly restful. The other persons who made up the party were nondescript enough, but there was also the feeling that one had penetrated the outskirts of a secret society. Mrs. Conyers had seemed as subject as myself to this sense of disquiet. Perhaps it was merely that she had passed on to me her own agitation; for I was sure she was agitated about something. Lovell had certainly tried to prepare me for an unusual household, but to absorb such antecedent descriptions is never easy. Molly Jeavons’s noisy, absolutely unrestrained directness of manner was of a kind that suggested both simplicity of nature and certainty of her own position: both characteristics that can stimulate that streak of social cruelty that few lack. There could be no doubt that Tolland was showing signs of preparing himself for some onslaught. The reason for his fears soon became apparent.

‘I didn’t know you ever met anyone but your own relations, Alfred,’ she said, evidently determined to pursue that subject. ‘You always pretend to me that you never go anywhere. I only got you here tonight because you wanted to hear from her own lips Mrs. Conyers’s story about the Empress Frederick. I believe your quiet evenings at home are all make-believe and that you live a disgracefully fast life — the gayest of gay bachelors.’

Tolland denied this imputation emphatically. He did not seem in the least flattered at the suggestion that he might be, so far as social life was concerned, a dark horse. He was patently without the smallest personal vanity, open or secret, on the matter of cutting a dash in life. He came at last to the end of his protests.

‘Alfred was talking about his family all through dinner,’ said Molly Jeavons, turning once more to me. ‘You know they are all in trouble — every blessed one of them.’

‘It’s too bad of you to say that, Molly. I only asked for your advice about some of my nephews and nieces.’

Now he sounded thoroughly aggrieved, although at the same time unwilling to withdraw voluntarily from a conversation devoted to his relations.

‘What’s the matter with the Tollands this time, Aunt Molly?’ asked Lovell.

He had been making a tour of the room, ending with our group.

‘Oh, it’s Erridge again,’ she said.

She spoke as if the question were hardly worth asking.

‘What’s Erridge’s latest?’

Lovell, for his part, spoke as one expecting to hear an enjoyable piece of gossip about a character always to be relied upon to provide a good story.

‘Living as a tramp,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘So I’m told at least. Somewhere in the Midlands. Grew a beard. He has still got it, they say. I don’t think he actually slept in casual wards. The other tramps must have had an awful time if he did. As a child he used to talk in his sleep and bawl the house down with night terrors.’

‘Is he doing that now?’ asked Lovell. ‘Being a tramp, I mean, not bawling the house down — though I shouldn’t wonder if he doesn’t have night terrors still.’

‘He is back at Thrubworth. Getting cleaned up after his adventures — as much as Erry ever gets cleaned up. Smith goes back tomorrow. I am more and more coming to think that Smith is more trouble than he is worth. It’s convenient to have a manservant in the house, but I found this morning we were completely out of gin, and I know at least two inches remained in the bottle left when we went to bed last night.’

Lovell was obviously disappointed that nothing more sensational about Erridge was to be revealed.

‘Feingold had some story about “a lord” who was doing “social research”,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be Erridge. I don’t expect the dumps he stopped at were any more uncomfortable than he has made Thrubworth by now. The whole place has been under dust-sheets since he succeeded, hasn’t it? Do you know Erridge, Nick? He must be about a contemporary of yours.’

‘He is a year or two older. I used to know him by sight. His brother, George Tolland, was nearer my age, though I didn’t know him either. But he isn’t “Erridge” any longer, is he?’

‘No, no, he is “Warminster” now, of course,’ said Molly Jeavons, impatiently. ‘But Alfred’s family always call their eldest son by the second title. I don’t even know what Erry’s Christian name is. Perhaps he hasn’t got one.’

‘Nonsense, of course he has,’ said Tolland, quite angrily. ‘His name is Alfred, like my own. You know that perfectly well, Molly. Besides, to call him “Erridge” is perfectly usual, isn’t it? In fact, off-hand, I can’t think of a single family that does differently.’

‘We always used to think it rather pompous,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘I can’t imagine myself ever addressing Jumbo as “Kilkeel” when he was alive. It would sound like a racehorse.’

‘Well, “Jumbo” sounds like an elephant to me,’ said Tolland.

This retort must have struck him as one of unusual subtlety, since he looked round at Lovell and myself in an appeal for applause; or at least for sympathy.

‘That’s just it,’ said Molly Jeavons, now speaking almost at the top of her voice. ‘My poor brother did look like an elephant. Nobody denied that, not even himself. But he did not look like a race-horse. Not one I would have put my money on, anyway.’

‘Bijou put her shirt on him,’ said Lovell.

‘Rubbish, she didn’t,’ said Molly Jeavons, beginning to laugh. ‘He put his shirt on her, you idiot — and lost it, too.’

I remembered, then, that Tolland had spoken of ‘my nephew, Warminster’, at the Le Bas dinner where we had met; at the same time mentioning that this young man had succeeded his father some years before. Tolland had added that his nephew was ‘a funny boy’. Erridge (as it seems simplest — like his parents — to continue to call him, anyway for the time being) remained in my mind as a gloomy, cadaverous schoolboy, trudging along the road close to the wall, his hands in his pockets and a pile of books slipping from under his arm. Angular, sallow and spotty, he was usually frowning angrily to himself, weighed down with anxiety, as if all the troubles of the world rested on his shoulders. The only time I could recall seeing him in later life was, years before, at a dance given by the Huntercombes. On that occasion, Erridge had looked so hot, cross and untidy that only the fact that he was wearing a tail-coat and white tie — neither in their first freshness — prevented him from resembling, even then, a harassed young tramp. His appearance that night had certainly borne out this recent account of him. The ball at the Huntercombes’ remained always with peculiar clarity in my mind as the night Barbara Goring had poured sugar over Widmerpool’s head.

‘Does Erridge often do this sort of thing?’ I asked. ‘Go off on “social research”, I mean?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘He has the oddest ideas. All your family have, haven’t they, Alfred? The whole blessed lot of them.’

Tolland made a nervous movement with his head, as if attempting to deny the principle of the accusation while at the same time regretfully having to admit, anyway in part, some of its immediate justice.

‘Warminster was not like that,’ he said. ‘I’m not like that. Not in the least. Nor are Frederica and George. And I trust the younger ones will turn out different from Erridge. They all seemed all right when they were children. Ran about and made a lot of noise. Just can’t tell, I suppose. Just — can’t — tell.’

If he expected this exhibition of philosophic resignation in some manner to appease Molly Jeavons, he was mistaken.

‘Certainly Frederica is not strange,’ she said, laughing uproariously at the idea. ‘Frederica is ordinary enough for anyone. Got to be in her job. Frederica is as ordinary as you like.’

This agreement with his conclusion — the complete, the absolute ordinariness of his niece, Frederica — seemed to bring some temporary alleviation to Tolland’s feelings. He nodded several times with satisfaction. I had some vague idea as to Frederica’s identity. She had married one of the Budds, brother or cousin of a ‘beauty’ called Margaret Budd, and her husband had been killed in a hunting accident only a few years later. People had talked about his death in the days when I used to dine with the Walpole-Wilsons. I remembered Anne Stepney talking about the accident.

As I was by then committed to this conversation about a lot of people regarding whom I knew little or nothing, I decided to take an active part by seeking further information. I asked what Frederica Budd’s job might be that required such extreme correctness of behaviour.

‘She is Lady-in-Waiting,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘Or she may be an Extra Woman of the Bedchamber. Something like that. Anyway, she has to behave herself jolly well. I’m surprised you haven’t met her, if you are an old friend of Mrs. Conyers. She and Frederica are great cronies.’

At that period, as I have said, I knew little of the Tollands, although increasingly during the past few years I had been hearing scraps of information about one or other of them, as happens when a large family, close to each other in age, begin in quick succession to appear in the world. Lovell had given some account of them at dinner. Molly Jeavons’s sister, Katherine, a childless widow, had married the late Lord Warminster as his second wife. ‘As a result,’ Lovell had said, ‘she possesses a dozen step-children.’ It turned out, in fact, that Erridge had only nine brothers and sisters. Even that number seemed preposterously large to an only child like myself. There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to ‘only’ children: misanthropy: neurasthenia: an inability to adapt themselves: all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalised outside the family circle. The Tollands, from what Lovell reported of them, sounded no exception to this prejudiced judgment.

‘Of course it was hard for them losing their mother — being left orphans, in fact,’ said Tolland. ‘Though of course Katherine has always done her best — been splendid, really.’

By introducing the name of the second Lady Warminster into the conversation, he may have hoped to carry the war into the enemy’s country. By then his face was more flushed than ever. His hostess was determined to let him off nothing. I had the impression that she was teasing him, not precisely for my especial benefit, but, at the same time, that my presence as a newcomer to the house afforded a particularly favourable opportunity for the application of torments of this sort. I found later that she was indeed what is called ‘a tease’, perhaps the only outward indication that her inner life was not altogether happy; since there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing. Later, too, I understood how much that night Alfred Tolland must have been torn between a pride that made him hesitate to discuss his relations in front of a stranger, and a taste for talking about his family, too rarely satisfied in his lonely life. It was a treat to visit someone who understood the niceties of family gossip, even if Molly Jeavons required her pound of flesh by ragging him. His face, completely masculine in cast, had at the same time that air of being quite untouched by sexual passion: a look noticeable sometimes among men of his generation. Lovell explained to me later that Tolland had always had a taste for good works and had been much used by the late Lord Sleaford in connexion with his charities. He was a fine example of my friend Barnby’s observation that ‘melancholy is the curse of the upper classes’.

‘And what about Norah?’ said Molly Jeavons.

She had to repeat the question twice, for the first time Tolland made no attempt to reply. He seemed completely knocked out. The challenge was apparently unanswerable. He could only nod his head. There was no spirit left in him. To bridge the silence, I asked if it were not true that Norah Tolland shared a flat with Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.

‘She does, she does,’ cried Molly Jeavons, laughing loudly again at my question, as if I had shown myself to have missed the whole point of what was being said. ‘Do you know them? I didn’t think they ever saw any young men. I’m jolly glad to hear they do. Tell me about them. Is it true that Eleanor has been seen in a green pork-pie hat and a bow tie?’

Mrs. Conyers, escaped from the man to whom French must be talked, now joining our group, nodded her head and pursed her lips, as if to emphasise the depths to which Eleanor had fallen.

‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen Eleanor for years,’ I said. ‘I used to dine with them once in a way. I saw Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson at the Isbister Retrospective Exhibition when it was on, and he said something about Norah Tolland. I’ve never met her.’

‘They look like a couple of stable-boys,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘And talk like stable-boys, too. I hear they swear like troopers.’

From the way she spoke, I suspected she knew very little about these two young women, and was, in fact, anxious to learn more. Finding me unable to offer a closely observed report on their activities, she abandoned the subject and renewed her general attack on Tolland.

‘And then Hugo,’ she said. ‘What about Hugo?’

She spoke as if Hugo clinched every other argument. If the name of Norah had knocked Tolland out, that of Hugo reduced him to the position of an army not only defeated in the field, but also forced to join as an ally its victorious adversary.

‘I hear his clothes are — well, awful,’ he muttered, almost inaudibly.

So far as Hugo was concerned, he seemed to agree absolutely with Molly Jeavons in thinking the situation could scarcely be worse.

‘But all undergraduates are like that,’ said Mrs. Conyers, unexpectedly. ‘I mean they all wear extraordinary clothes, don’t they? They always have — and say things to try and shock people. My father used to say they were like that even in his day. I know he himself, just after he had been sent down from Oxford, said some terrible thing to Mr. Gladstone when he was introduced to him at Holland House. My father had to write and apologise, or I don’t know what would have happened. I am not sure the Ministry might not have fallen.’

‘Well,’ said Molly Jeavons, ‘I’ve known some undergraduates in my time — Jumbo, for instance, you should have seen him in his young days — but I’ve never met one who dressed like Hugo. I was talking to the Bridgnorths’ boy, John Mountfichet, when he was here the other day. He is at the same college as Hugo. He told us some things that would make your hair stand on end. They made Teddy laugh, and you know how difficult that is.’

‘Even Sillery says Hugo goes too far,’ said Lovell. ‘He drives all the other dons quite mad, of course, but I should have thought Sillery would have stuck up for him. The other undergraduates are very disapproving too. Apart from anything else, aesthetes have gone completely out of fashion at both universities these days. I told Hugo when I saw him the other day that he was hopelessly out of date.’

‘What did he say?’

‘“My dear, I love being dated. I hate all this bickering that goes on about politics. I wish I’d lived in the Twenties when people were amusing.”’

Lovell spoke the words with the mannerism he judged appropriate to such an impersonation.

‘He’ll grow out of it,’ said Mrs. Conyers, surprising me with this repeated display of toleration. ‘Lots of nice young men go through a stage of being rather silly.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Alfred Tolland, with a sigh.

He did not sound very confident.

‘At any rate, George is all right,’ he added a moment later.

I had the impression he was playing his last card, but that this card was a trump.

‘What is George Tolland doing now?’ I asked. ‘He was the one of the family who was my contemporary, though I never really knew him.’

‘In the Coldstream for some years,’ said Alfred Tolland. ‘Then he thought he ought to try and make some money, so he went into the City. He has done fairly well, so they say. Never know what people mean by that — but they say pretty well.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘I am sure that George has done well. But what a correct young man—what a correct young man! I don’t think I ever met a young man who was so correct. I can’t see how we are ever going to get him married, he is so correct — and even if we found a correct wife for him, I am sure they would both be much too correct to have any children. And even if they did, what frightfully correct children they would have to be.’

‘You can’t have it both ways, Molly,’ grumbled Tolland. ‘You blame some of them for misbehaving themselves. Perhaps you are right. But then you don’t approve of George because he is what you call “correct”. Can’t understand it. There is no pleasing you. It isn’t reasonable.’

‘Well, now I’ll tell you about the rest of them,’ said Molly Jeavons, turning to me. ‘Of course I really adore them all, and just say these things to make Alfred cross. There is Susan, who is showing every sign of getting engaged to a nice young man, then there is Blanche—’

‘I’ve seen Blanche, though I don’t know her.’

‘Blanche is dotty. You must know that much, if you’ve seen her. But she’s not a bad old thing.’

‘Of course not.’

Alfred Tolland showed no disposition to deny the ‘dottiness’ of his niece, Blanche.

‘Robert is a bit of a mystery. He is in some business, but I don’t know whether he will stay there. Isobel — well, she is a bit different too. I’m not sure she isn’t going to get engaged soon herself. Then there is Priscilla, who is on the point of coming out, and was to have been here tonight, but she doesn’t seem to have turned up yet.’

I made an effort to take in this bird’s-eye view of the Tollands, who now seemed to surround me on all sides after this vivid exposition of their several characters. Instinctively, I felt the greatest interest in Isobel, who was ‘different’; and also an odd feeling of regret that she might be about to become engaged in the near future. While I was brooding on this, Jeavons joined us. He stood there, scanning everyone’s face closely, as if hoping for some explanation of the matter in hand; perhaps even of life itself, so intense was his concentration: some reasonable interpretation couched in terms simple enough for a plain man to understand without undue effort. He also gave the impression of an old dog waiting to have a ball thrown to retrieve, more because that was the custom in the past than because sport or exercise was urgently required. However, no one enlightened him as to the subject under discussion, so he merely filled up my glass, and then his own. His wife and Alfred Tolland had now embarked on some detailed aspect of Tolland life, too esoteric for an outsider to follow.

‘In the film business like Chips?’ Jeavons asked, in a low husky voice, as if he had a cold coming on, or had drunk too much whisky the night before.

‘Yes.’

‘Ever met any of the stars?’

‘Not so you’d notice. I’m on the scenario side. The studio only makes English pictures for the quota. They wouldn’t be likely to employ anyone very grand in the way of an actor or actress.’

Jeavons seemed disappointed at this answer.

‘Still,’ he urged, ‘you must see some beauties sometimes, don’t you?’

‘I’ve sat next to Adolph Menjou,’ said his wife, suddenly abandoning the subject of the Tollands, and breaking in with her accustomed violence, though not, I think, with any idea of preventing him from pursuing the question of film actresses and their looks. ‘He had such nice manners. Of course Garbo is the one I should really like to meet. I suppose everyone would. Wouldn’t you like to meet Garbo, Alfred?’

‘Never heard of him,’ said Tolland.

Inevitably there was some laughter at this.

‘It’s a she,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘It’s a she, Alfred.’

‘An actress, I suppose,’ said Tolland, ‘or you wouldn’t be using that tone of voice. I don’t think I particularly want to meet Miss Garbo — or perhaps it is Mrs. Garbo.’

There was more laughter at that. I was not sure — I am not sure to this day — whether he was feigning ignorance of the famous film star, whose name at that moment, the zenith of her fame, was a synonym for mysterious, elusive, feminine beauty; or whether he had, in truth, never heard of her.

‘I once met Mrs. Patrick Campbell when I was a young man,’ he said, speaking as if the statement was an afterthought. ‘Heard her read aloud High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire. Wonderful experience. Felt different all the evening. Couldn’t sleep after it. Lay awake — well — till the morning, nearly.’

Possibly Molly Jeavons felt that for a brief second the tables had been turned on her, because she now returned to the charge in the game of baiting him about his family, probably feeling in that activity on safer ground.

‘Tell us more about the stained-glass window, Alfred,’ she said.

This request galvanised him once again to the point of anger. She seemed to have touched some specially sensitive nerve.

‘I’ve told you already, Molly,’ he said, ‘the window has never been put up as it should have been. Erridge isn’t interested.’

‘Surely somebody in the family can tell him to do it,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you tell him to get on with the job yourself? He must do it, that’s all.’

She spoke as if her own decision made the matter final. Alfred Tolland shook his head gloomily.

‘As well ask him to lead the glass himself,’ he said. ‘Better, in fact. He might have a try at that. Dignity of labour or something. But as for taking an interest in his own grandfather’s memorial —’

Tolland shook his head, finding metaphor, as applied to Erridge, impotent.

‘Can’t George take it on?’ insisted Molly Jeavons. ‘You think so highly of George.’

Tolland shook his head again.

‘Difficult for George,’ he said. ‘Delicate, with Erridge the eldest son. George doesn’t want to be snubbed.’

‘Oh, goodness,’ said Molly Jeavons, throwing up her hands, ‘you Tollands drive me mad.’

Some new guests came into the room at that moment, so that her own plan for solving the problem of the stained-glass window was never revealed. In the reshuffle of places, I found myself tête-à-tête with Mrs. Conyers. After a few preliminary enquiries about my parents, she explained that the General was indisposed, though not seriously, having fallen headlong from the stable loft where the poodles’ food was stored. He must at that time have been a few years short of eighty.

‘But I did not remember you knew Lady Molly,’ said Mrs. Conyers in a low voice.

‘I did not, until tonight.’

‘Rather a happy-go-lucky household. That very extraordinary butler. One does not know what is going to be said next.’

‘So I should think.’

‘Too much so for me. I am old-fashioned, I’m afraid. I do not at all mind admitting it.’

I was reminded of Hugo Tolland, said to like being ‘dated’, but thought it wiser not to remind Mrs. Conyers of the parallel. I wondered why she had agreed to dine with the Jeavonses if she felt so inimical to them.

‘But you yourself must have known Lady Molly for a long time?’

‘Of course we have known her for years and years. But never well. When she was Lady Sleaford my youngest sister, Mildred, knew her, and we used to meet sometimes. I have hardly seen her since her second marriage. We know the present Sleafords, but I don’t think Lady Molly ever sees anything of them. That is to be expected, perhaps.’

‘You dined here?’

‘It was really on account of my sister. I can’t remember whether you have ever met Mildred.’

‘Only when I was a child. When you showed me the sword the sultan gave the General.’

Mrs. Conyers smiled.

‘That was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘Then you really do not know her.’

Some of the subsequent history of Mildred Blaides was, in fact, familiar to me from occasional talk on the part of my parents. Considered rather ‘fast’ in her early days — as might be expected from my memory of her — she had married a Flying Corps officer called M’Cracken, who had been killed not long after the wedding in a raid over Germany. Then there had been a period of widowhood, when her behaviour had been thought ‘flighty’. From the manner in which this interlude in her career used to be discussed, I imagine that my parents’ generation supposed her to be about to go to the bad in a spectacular manner. However, this very generally prophesied débâcle never took place. Mildred Blaides married again: the second time to an Australian business-man, a Mr. Haycock, retired, fairly rich, who owned a villa in the South of France and spent a good deal of his time travelling round the world. Mr. Haycock, who was said to possess sterling virtues in addition to his comfortable income, was also agreed to be ‘rather rough’. The marriage, so far as I knew, had been quite a success. There were children, but I did not know how many.

‘As a matter of fact, my sister Mildred is a very old friend of our hostess,’ said Mrs. Conyers, as if the matter was weighing on her mind. ‘As I say, she knows Lady Molly far better than I do. Mildred nursed at Dogdene during the war.’

‘I remember her in nurse’s uniform.’

‘She is coming here tonight. She was to have dined, but at the last moment she was unable to be at dinner. She is — more or less engaged to a friend of Lady Molly’s. As I expect you know, Mildred’s husband died about a year ago. Unfortunately a business engagement prevented her — I suppose I should say — fiancé from dining. He is a very busy man. He just could not get away tonight in Ume. Then Mildred herself is always changing her plans. Goodness knows why she herself could not come here without him. However, she couldn’t, so there it was. They are both looking in later.’

There could be no doubt now that the matter which worried, or at least unusually preoccupied, Mrs. Conyers was connected with her sister’s arrival. I could not at first decide exactly what had upset her.

‘This is not the first time you have met him — the fiancé?’

‘As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen him yet,’ she said, almost apologetically, as if that was the least I could expect of her. ‘You see, it only happened yesterday. That was why Lady Molly arranged the dinner. She didn’t seem to mind their not turning up in the least. Of course, she is much more used to people changing their arrangements than I am.’

It seemed probable that she was merely suffering some anxiety regarding the potentialities of the man who was to be her sister’s third husband. I knew enough about the reputation of Mildred Blaides to realise that anxiety was reasonable enough.

‘He is a good deal younger than Mildred,’ she said.

After announcing this fact, Mrs. Conyers decided to abandon the subject, perhaps fearing that in her own overwrought state she might say too much. She gave a sigh.

‘If I must talk French,’ she went on, with rather forced gaiety, ‘I do so much prefer not to have to talk the language to a Frenchman. They are so terribly severe. I always tell them that they will never admit that any other Frenchman speaks correct French, so how can they possibly expect me to do so. That young man over there actually complimented me on my French accent.’

‘Who is he?’

‘From one of the Balkan Legations. I think his father was Minister over here, and used to stop at Dogdene. He was invited about rather more than you might expect because he was an unusually good shot. In the end the poor fellow was shot himself by an anarchist in his own country. The son had news of Prince Theodoric. In fact, I think he has just ceased to be a member of the Prince’s personal household. As you probably know, Theodoric was rather a special friend of the divorced wife of Lady Molly’s brother, Lord Ardglass, who died some years ago. Our hostess always likes to hear about him on that account. Between you and me, I am afraid she is a tiny bit of a gossip, but don’t say I said so.’

Mrs. Conyers smiled a little slyly.

‘Who are the two girls who have just come in and are talking to Chips Lovell?’

‘He is the young man you arrived with, isn’t he? The nearest is one of the Tolland girls, Priscilla, I think. She was going to see a film with a former school friend of hers whose name I was not told.’

Priscilla Tolland looked more than seventeen: even so, she had not entirely lost a long-legged, childish awkwardness in the manner in which she stood with her legs crossed. I could see she bore a strong likeness to the ‘dotty’ Blanche, though certainly free herself from any such disability. The girl with her, prototype of all school friends, was small and dark with horn-rimmed spectacles and an air of bossing everyone about. I thought I would have a word with them in a minute or two; when Mrs. Conyers had finished speaking of the misty past, into which she was now making a deep excursion. However, opportunity to approach the girls never came, because a second later, just as Mrs. Conyers had invited me to tea with herself and the General the following Sunday, two more persons, a man and woman, entered the room.

‘Ah, there is Mildred at last,’ said Mrs. Conyers, fumbling with her lorgnette, her thin hands, almost pale mauve in colour, shaking with excitement and anxiety.

I myself was curious to see what Mildred Blaides — or rather Mildred Haycock — might look like after all these years, half expecting her to be wearing her V.A.D. outfit and smoking a cigarette. But when my eyes fell on the two of them, it was the man, not the woman, who held my attention. Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one. This was just such a performance. The fiancé was Widmerpool. Scarlet in the face, grinning agitatedly through the thick lenses of his spectacles, he advanced into the room, his hand on Mrs. Haycock’s arm. He was wearing a new dark suit. Like a huge fish swimming into a hitherto unexplored, unexpectedly exciting aquarium, he sailed resolutely forward: yet not a real fish, a fish made of rubber or some artificial substance. There was something a little frightening about him. That could not be denied. Molly Jeavons, this time supported by her husband, closed in on these new arrivals immediately.

‘Well, he is no beauty,’ said Mrs. Conyers.

She spoke with such deep relief at her discovery of the unpleasingness of Widmerpool’s features that she must have feared the worst of her sister’s choice on account of the reported difference of age. Probably she had pictured some golden-haired gigolo of altogether unacceptable personal appearance. The truth was a great consolation to her. Certainly, to look at them, they seemed on the score of age to be a couple very reasonably to be associated together. Mrs. Haycock was in the neighbourhood of forty, and looked no younger, but Widmerpool, although only a year or so over thirty, had always appeared comfortably middle-aged even as a boy.

‘I know him.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He is called Kenneth Widmerpool. I was at school with him as a matter of fact. He is in the City.’

‘I know his name of course. And that he is in the City. But what is he like?’

Mrs. Conyers did not attempt to conceal her own impatience. The reason of her anxiety was now made plain. She had no confidence in her sister’s choice of husband. She wanted to know the worst as soon as possible. Her first, and most serious, fears were passed; she wished to move on to a later stage of enquiry. Widmerpool, although giving her reason to be thankful that the outlook was not more threatening, had evidently made no very captivating impression.

‘Is he nice?’

‘I’ve known him a long time ‘

By then we were both involved in general introductions taking place round the room, so that I was not forced to answer the question. Afterwards, when I got home, I pondered what I should most properly have said in reply. The fact was that Widmerpool could hardly be described as ‘nice’. Energetic: able: successful: all kinds of things that had never been expected of him in the past; but ‘nice’ he had never been, and showed little sign of becoming. Yet, for some reason, I was quite glad to see him again. His reappearance, especially in that place, helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way. Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road; perhaps it would be more apt to say that his course, as one jogged round the track, was run from time to time, however different the pace, in common with my own. As an aspect of my past he was an element to be treated with interest, if not affection, like some unattractive building or natural feature of the landscape which brought back the irrational nostalgia of childhood. A minute later I found myself talking to him.

‘No, I haven’t seen you for a long time,’ he said, breathing heavily as usual, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you, as a matter of fact, to tell you I was getting married.’

‘Many congratulations.’

‘Time to settle down,’ he said.

This remark was fatuous, since he had never been anything but ‘settled down’, at least in my eyes. I could not imagine why he should specially wish to tell me about his marriage, although there could be no doubt from his manner that he was in a great state of excitement at the thought of being engaged. His nose and lips, beneath the huge headlamps of his now rimless spectacles, were twitching slightly. Lunging out towards Mrs. Haycock, who stood not far from him, he seized her arm and drew her in our direction.

‘This is Nicholas Jenkins, my dear. An old friend of mine. He was somewhat my junior at school.’

Mrs. Haycock, who had been talking to her sister, now turned and faced me, so that for the first time since she had entered the room I had an opportunity of observing closely the woman he hoped to make his wife. I could at once appreciate the strong impression she might have made on him the moment she showed herself prepared to accept him as an admirer. Tall, elegant, brassy, she was markedly of the same generation as Molly Jeavons, without personally at all resembling her. Mrs. Haycock’s moral separateness from Widmerpool, immediately noticeable, was not on account of any difference of age, as such, for — as I have said — Widmerpool had never looked young. It was a separateness imposed upon her by the war. Like Jeavons, that was the epoch to which she belonged by some natural right. Life on the Riviera had no doubt left its mark too: a society in which Widmerpool was unlikely hitherto to have participated. She retained some of her sunburn from the previous summer, and, although dressed quite normally — indeed, rather well — her clothes seemed in some indefinable manner more adapted to a plage or casino than the Jeavons drawing-room.

I had always felt an interest in what might be called the theoretical side of Widmerpool’s life: the reaction of his own emotions to the severe rule of ambition that he had from the beginning imposed upon himself: the determination that existence must be governed by the will. However, the interest one takes in the lives of other people is, at best, feeble enough, so that, knowing little of his affairs in recent years, I had in truth largely forgotten about him. Now, for the second time that evening, I recalled the night when that noisy little girl, Barbara Goring, had poured sugar over his head at the Huntercombes’ dance. He had been in love with her; and I, too, for that matter, or had thought so at the time. Then there had been his brief, painful association with Gipsy Jones, the grubby Left Wing nymph, whose ‘operation’ he had defrayed unrewarded. After the Gipsy Jones business, he had told me he would never again have anything to do with a woman who ‘took his mind off his work.’ I wondered whether Mrs. Haycock would satisfy that condition: whether he had proposed to her under stress of violent emotion, or had decided such a marriage would help his career. Perhaps there was an element of both motives; in any case, to attempt to disengage motives in marriage is a fruitless task. Mrs. Haycock took my hand, smiling absently, and gave it a good squeeze; the clutch of a woman pretty familiar with men and their ways.

‘One always has to meet such crowds of people when one gets married,’ she said, ‘It is really too, too exhausting. Did you say we had met before? Was it at Cannes? I seem to know your face.’

She spoke breathlessly, almost asthmatically, in which she resembled Widmerpool, but using that faint hint of cockney, an accent in part bequeathed by the overtones of the Prince of Wales to the world to which she belonged. I tried, quite unsuccessfully and perhaps not very tactfully, to explain the circumstances of our infinitely distant former meeting. It was plainly years since she had listened to any remarks addressed to her, either serious or trivial, so that perhaps deservedly — for the exposition was a formidable rigmarole upon which to embark at that moment — she swiftly disengaged herself from its demands.

‘I’m absolutely longing for a drink, Molly,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Jeavons, what an angel you are. I have been having the most awful time tonight. You know I abominate making plans.. Never make them, as a matter of fact. I just won’t. Well, this evening I got caught up by one of the most awful bores you ever met.’

She drank deeply of the glass brought by Jeavons, and began telling him the story. Widmerpool took me aside.

‘Did I hear you say you had met Mildred before?’

He spoke anxiously.

‘When I was about nine or ten.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

He sounded quite angry at this statement of mine, intended to set his mind at rest. He supposed I wanted to tease him.

‘Just what I said. It was years ago — with her sister, Mrs. Conyers, to whom you were introduced a second ago. My family have always known General Conyers.’

I hardly knew why I added this last piece of information which sounded somehow a trifle absurd and unnecessary, emphasing the fact that Widmerpool and the General would become brothers-in-law. However, Widmerpool was appeased by this amplification.

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘Quite so.’

All at once he became abstracted in manner.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Come and have luncheon with me. We haven’t had a talk for a long time. What about next Sunday — at my club?’

‘All right. Thanks very much.’

The name of the club surprised me a little. There was no reason at all why he should not belong there, yet its mild suggestion of cosmopolitan life and high card stakes evoked an environment seemingly unsuited to his nature. When employed at Donners-Brebners, Widmerpool must have spent a fair amount of his time with foreign businessmen. Indeed, his professional background at that time might well have been described as international. There was nothing against him on that count. Equally, if he ever played cards, he might, for all I knew, venture high stakes. He could presumably afford such a risk. Neither of these aspects of the scene altered the sense of incongruity. To eyes that had known him as a boy, even the smallest pretension to swagger appeared, for Widmerpool, out of place. That was the point. The verdict was inescapable. Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him. Such a demand on my part, even though unvoiced, was, of course, absurd. Widmerpool’s conduct was, in any case, no concern of mine. Besides, these sentiments were utterly at variance with Widmerpool’s own view of himself; a view that would obviously play the chief part in his choice of club — or, for that matter, of wife. If such a club was inappropriate to him, how much more incongruous would be a wife like Mrs. Haycock. I could not help thinking that. We talked for a time of general matters. Later on Lovell came across the room.

‘I am giving Priscilla Tolland and her friend a lift home,’ he said. ‘Do you want to be taken as far as your flat?’

I had no difficulty in perceiving the reason for this offer and resigned myself to sitting in the back with the friend.

‘Come and see us again,’ said Molly Jeavons, when saying good-bye. ‘Make Chips bring you, or just drop in.’

‘So long, old man, come again,’ said Jeavons.

He had been standing for a long time by the drink tray, plunged in deep thought, perhaps still contemplating the subject of film stars and their varied, disturbing charms. Now he took me by the hand, as if his thoughts were far away. I followed Lovell and the girls downstairs to the car. Outside there was a hint of fog in the air. The river mist seemed to have pursued us from the Studio. Nothing of note happened on the way home. The school friend talked incessantly of the visit she was going to pay to Florence. We dropped her at an address in Wimpole Street, after disposing of Priscilla Tolland at her stepmother’s house in Hyde Park Gardens.